Membership Policy

Use Dist policy to exclude unwanted packages and limit the number of versions in indexes. Set exclude and limit in sow.yml:

dists:
  el9:
    format: rpm
    limit: 2
    exclude:
      - kind: [debuginfo, debugsource, llvmjit]

SOW applies exclude first, then limit. add, rm, and build apply policy to the complete candidate membership of each selected Dist. Edit the policy, run sow config check, then run sow build to apply it to existing members.

Exclude packages

Each rule contains one or more fields. All fields in a rule must match. Any pattern within a field can match. A package is excluded when any rule matches.

exclude:
  - kind: [debuginfo, debugsource, dbgsym, dbg, llvmjit]
  - name: ["test-*", "*-experimental"]
    arch: [aarch64]

This excludes the listed package kinds on every architecture. It also excludes aarch64 packages whose names start with test- or end with -experimental.

Patterns are case-sensitive exact strings or shell globs: *, ?, and [...]. Regular expressions, version comparisons, and negation are not supported. Empty rules, empty or untrimmed patterns, duplicate patterns within a field, and invalid globs are errors.

SOW derives kind from the binary package name:

Use sow show PACKAGE --json to inspect the computed kind. Pattern values are not checked against this table: kind: [debug] is valid YAML but matches no package kind.

Limit versions

limit groups packages by binary name and canonical architecture family. Neutral packages (noarch or all) form their own group.

RPM versions use epoch-version-release ordering. DEB versions use Debian version ordering. Versions are not sorted as plain strings.

With limit: 2, adding version 3 to a Dist that contains versions 1 and 2 removes version 1 from membership in the same operation. An x86_64 package and a noarch package count in separate groups, even when they share a binary name.

Read policy results

An input excluded from every selected Dist has item status excluded. Its per-Dist result is excluded for an exclusion rule or limited for the version cap. Policy exclusion does not count as a failed input and does not make the command fail.

A package can be accepted by one Dist and excluded by another. If no Dist accepts a new package, SOW does not store an unreferenced package object for it.

Restore a removed version

Relaxing policy does not restore previous members. Raising limit, removing an exclusion, or deleting the newest version only changes the rules for current and future candidates. To restore a version, add its package file again:

sow add ./archive/example-1.0-1.x86_64.rpm -r demo -d el9

Policy removes membership, not package bytes. A package can remain in the pool because a built or retained generation still needs it. Use sow gc to reclaim unreferenced objects. Use sow gc TARGET for a published target.

Preview removal

sow rm example -r demo -d el9 --check

The preview reports membership removals and predicted file changes without changing repository state. Check prediction_complete in JSON before treating the file list as complete. --check cannot be combined with --skip, --timeout, or --no-wait.

See Configuration for the full schema and sow add for input results.